The previous post (by vjtorley) featured a video by a YouTube Christian apologist, IMBeggar, in which he attempts to defuse the problem of evil. It’s riddled with problems as you can see by reading the OP and the comments.
Out of curiosity, I visited IMBeggar’s YouTube channel and watched some of his other videos. One of them, titled “Why doesn’t God just show Himself?”, tackled the problem of divine hiddenness. It was even worse than the one that addressed the problem of evil. I was surprised to find that I disagreed with every major point.
The problem of divine hiddenness, in a nutshell, is this: God supposedly loves us and wants everyone to be saved (1 Timothy 2:3-4). Salvation requires that we accept Jesus as our Lord and savior (Romans 10:9-10). To accept Jesus, you have to know about him and believe in him. God, being infinitely wise, knows the best way to get the message out and persuade people to become believers. Being omnipotent, he’s able to do it. Why then does he seem to botch it so badly? To me, the answer is obvious. God doesn’t exist, or at the very least he doesn’t have the characteristics attributed to him by Christians.
Perhaps he doesn’t want everyone to be saved. Perhaps he’s not smart enough to do a decent job of communicating with us. Perhaps he isn’t powerful enough to pull it off. Maybe he’s being thwarted by Satan, who is more powerful. Maybe the dog ate his homework. None of those reasons will appeal to Christians, because they all clash with the Christian view of God.
Thinking Christians are thus faced with the problem of justifying, to themselves and others, the fact that the all-powerful and omniscient Christian God does so poorly at this task, plus the fact that the evidence for his existence is so scant and unpersuasive. In other words, the job is to explain why he remains hidden from so many of us (hence the term “divine hiddenness”). In his video, IMBeggar (henceforth “Beggar”) attempts to spell this out for us. I address his main points below.
Could God simply reveal himself to everyone in all his glory?
Beggar says no, because he claims that we couldn’t withstand it. It would overwhelm us. He illustrates this in the video with a dramatic scene where there’s a blinding light in the sky, with people running around dazed and confused on the ground, screaming.
But if God is omnipotent he could easily modulate his appearance so that it didn’t overwhelm us, yet was spectacular enough to convince us of his existence. Or he could design humans with the ability to withstand the sight of him in his full glory.
Beggar is underestimating his omnipotent God’s abilities, which ironically is something Christians often do when searching for excuses for their deity’s behavior.
Couldn’t God reveal himself through “cosmic signs and wonders”?
Beggar says “These would probably work for a while, but let’s be honest – people are fickle, and after the 20th or 30th cosmic wonder we’d be like ‘Oh, good. The sun disappeared again as I’m driving to work. In the dark. Again.’” Once again, he’s underestimating the power of an omnipotent God. First, God could make the “cosmic wonders” impressive enough that he wouldn’t need 20 or 30 of them in a row in order to convince people of his existence. Or, if he did want to use a long series of cosmic wonders, he could arrange for each one to be more spectacular than the previous one, so that people would be rapt and waiting to see what would happen next. The whole world would be fascinated and everyone would be talking about it. God could even limit himself to a single spectacular cosmic wonder but make it absolutely unambiguous. An example I’ve used in the past is that God could rearrange a bunch of distant galaxies so that when viewed using earthbound telescopes, they would spell out something like “I, Yahweh, am God, and Jesus Christ is my only begotten son.” It’s unlikely that any entity other than God could pull off a stunt like that. Who else would have the power to move galaxies around that are millions or billions of light years away? It would certainly make me sit up and take notice.Why couldn’t God do that or something similarly convincing?
Beggar also complains that there’s nothing personal about cosmic wonders, but so what? If he was seeking personal relationships with people, nothing would stop God from staging cosmic wonders and additionally communicating with people individually. See the next point.
Couldn’t God reveal himself to each of us individually?
Beggar scoffs, asking “Doesn’t this seem a little… door-to-door salesman?” as if there were something cheesy about it. What’s cheesy about personal encounters with God? What about all the Biblical figures who had such encounters? Should they have felt insulted? At this point in the video, Beggar has already claimed that God wants to have a personal relationship with each of us. What better way to establish such relationships than by interacting with us as individuals and having a conversation with each of us?
Beggar also asks “And when would he do it? At what age? For how long?” as if that were a problem. Does he really think that his omniscient God couldn’t figure out the right time and duration for each of his creatures? And why would he limit himself to one encounter, if multiple encounters throughout life were more effective? Beggar has once again underestimated what an omniscient, omnipotent God is capable of.
Note to Christians: If you want to claim that your God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, then think about what that means. Stop underestimating him. I realize that it’s convenient to underestimate God at times because as Beggar demonstrates, that allows you to make excuses for him. But you aren’t being consistent if you do that. God is either omni or he’s not. Which is it?
Doesn’t it make more sense for God to reveal himself to everybody at once, versus to each of us individually?
No, it doesn’t. This is yet another underestimation by Beggar. It isn’t like God needs to conserve his energy. He’s omnipotent, after all. Revealing himself to each person individually is no more taxing than revealing himself to everyone all at once. Plus, he can’t reveal himself to everyone at once, because not all of us are alive at the same time. Some people are inevitably going to miss out on this one-time event.
That problem goes away if he engages us as individuals. If he does that, every person from the dawn of time until now will have a direct, persuasive, personal encounter with God at the appropriate age, in the right place, and for the appropriate duration. What’s not to like about that?
What if God revealed himself to everyone by “infusing” knowledge of himself directly into their brains?
Beggar claims that this would deprive us of our freedom, but why? If God merely infuses knowledge of himself into our brains, that doesn’t force or obligate us to respond to him in some fixed way. We still can choose how to respond to him. Our freedom isn’t impacted.
If God interacts with us physically, he’s still infusing knowledge of himself into our brains. It’s just that he’s doing it indirectly via our senses and our thought processes. What difference does that make in terms of our freedom?
He could become one of us
Beggar says that God could “cross over into our time and space” and become “one of us”. He’s obviously thinking of Jesus here, and as you’d expect, he claims that this way of communicating with us is superior to the others he’s discussed. I’m not sure why — he doesn’t really explain it in the video.
I think it’s a terrible way for God to reveal himself, because if he becomes human, it’s very easy (and in fact sensible) to doubt that he is God. Much smarter for God to reveal himself in such a way that he appears unambiguously divine. Beggar anticipates this objection and addresses it in his next point.
As a human, he can’t just tell people that he’s God
Beggar notes that people will rightly think you’re crazy or lying if you tell people you’re God, so how does Jesus get around this problem? Beggar offers two solutions: 1) arrange a bunch of prophecies at various times and places, foretelling your arrival; and 2) perform miracles.
The problem with the supposed prophecies predicting the arrival of Jesus is that they’re not at all convincing to someone who hasn’t already drunk the Kool-Aid, but that’s a topic for another thread.
The problem with miracles is that they need to be something that can’t be faked using magician-style tricks. Also, few people will witness them firsthand, so those of us who aren’t there at the time are stuck with secondary accounts which are notoriously unreliable. There is every reason to doubt that Jesus was God, and a book written by a believer, who himself hasn’t witnessed the supposed miracles and has only heard about them secondhand, shouldn’t be convincing to anyone without a lot of corroborating evidence.
Once again, we’re talking about an omniscient God here. Does Beggar really think that an omniGod can’t come up with a better way of getting the word out? Are dubious prophecies and secondhand accounts of miracles really the best he can do?
Is showing himself once, 2000 years ago, really sufficient?
Beggar says “I know what some of you are thinking: ‘Yeah, but that was 2000 years ago. I wasn’t there.'” His response is a non-sequitur: “Do you think God is bound by space and time?” My answer: No, but we are. God, being timeless, can appear at any time or at all times, but each of us humans is only around for a lifetime, and all but a tiny fraction of us weren’t around when Jesus was. And of those who were living at the time, only a tiny fraction in one corner of the world encountered Jesus. If God really wanted to get the word out he could have done a much better job than that.
Beggar also asks “Do you think your mind and your soul is bound by space and time?” My answer: I don’t think we have souls, but our minds are certainly bound by space and time. Even if we had souls, and our minds and souls weren’t bound by space and time, so what? In order to be saved, each of us has to get the message while we are here on earth. Jesus isn’t around anymore, so we have nothing to rely on other than dubious biblical accounts (which contradict each other anyway). If that’s the best God can do, he has really dropped the ball.
Beggar wraps up the video with the assertion that God “walked on the face of this earth as a human being” in the form of Jesus. There’s more to critique, but I’ll leave that for the comments.
Neil:
Yes, but I’m still not seeing how you get from that to Flint’s conclusion:
Put them together and you’ll see what I mean:
How does that follow? It’s a non-sequitur. To justify Flint’s conclusion, you’d have to add another premise, like “there are no true propositions”. But besides being silly, that’s not part of the reasoning of mine that Flint is referring to, so even then you wouldn’t have justified Flint’s claim:
How do you arrive at Flint’s conclusion by employing my reasoning?
Neil:
keiths:
Neil:
It is actually round, because it fits the definition I provided above:
Note the word “approximately”. It’s part of the definition. The earth is shaped approximately like a sphere, so it qualifies as round.
If an object had to be shaped exactly like a sphere in order to qualify as round, then what would qualify? Not baseballs, basketballs, tennis balls, bowling balls, golf balls, billiard balls. Not grapes, oranges, grapefruit. Not ball bearings, marbles, gumballs. Even the most spherical object in the world isn’t exactly sphere-shaped. Do you really want to claim that round objects don’t exist on earth?
It’s convenience to use simplifying descriptions when modeling reality. How much scale and accuracy matter depend on circumstances.
“Universals”?
Keiths asks, “If an object had to be shaped exactly like a sphere in order to qualify as round, then what would qualify?”
The answer is “nothing”.
Very pedantic point to essentially abandon any attempt for language to discuss the real world in geometric terms.
aleta:
Right. To Neil, a circular saw isn’t circular. A drawing of a rectangle isn’t rectangular. The Ellipse in Washington isn’t an ellipse. The Pentagon isn’t a pentagon. The hexagonal storm on Saturn isn’t hexagonal. A square block isn’t square.
And I suppose one price can’t be higher than another, because prices don’t occupy positions in space.
Well, of course you are not seeing it. You have a hopelessly naive understanding of “true”.
Without a clear definition of “approximately”, your argument is pointless.
Yes, we use “round” for things that are approximately round. But we don’t use if for everything that is approximately round. It’s conventional to say that the world is round. It is unconventional to say that a walnut is round or that a football (as used in American football) is round.
That’s why it is a matter of pragmatic convention.
Who is it you say is being pedantic, Jack? It is often clarifying to learn in what sense someone is using a word.
ETA Arguing some point at UD one time, I used the word “terrestrial” and had to spend several comments clarifying the contextual antonym was alien rather than marine.
Alan:
Who needed clarification? Do you really think anyone, including Neil, was unsure of what I meant when I said “the earth is round”? Particularly in opposition to “the earth is flat”? My meaning was obvious. Neil was being pedantic, as if “perfectly spherical” were the only meaning of “round”.
Neil:
People use the word “approximately” all the time, only rarely accompanied by a definition. Are their statements “pointless”?
Right, because that’s how the word is defined. It’s this weird quirk of language that people use words in a way that’s appropriate to their meanings. For example, people say things like “that test was hard” because one of the meanings of “hard” is “difficult”. And they speak of “higher” prices simply because one of the meanings of “higher” is “greater in magnitude”. Bizarre, isn’t it?
People say “the earth is round” because as an approximately spherical object, the earth matches one of the meanings of “round”. And because it matches, the statement “the earth is round” is true. The meaning of “round” is a social convention, but the fact that the earth’s shape matches that meaning is not. The earth really does have the shape it does, regardless of the words used to describe that shape. Germans say “die Erde ist rund”, but despite the fact that “rund” is a different word whose meaning is a social convention, the earth’s actual shape remains the same. “Die Erde is rund” is just as true as “the earth is round”.
Neil can speak for himself but I’m not convinced by your binarism.
Alan:
Lol.
Neil:
Flint’s claim was that my reasoning, as expressed in the quote he provided, leads to the conclusion that “nobody can actually know anything”. You agreed with him. How does my reasoning, including my “hopelessly naive understanding of true”, lead to that conclusion?
ETA: adding the quotes here for convenience:
keiths:
Flint:
This is where you go wrong.
Yes, the meaning of “round” is a social convention. But meanings are not rigid entities that can be fitted to reality. How a word can be used is convention. Whether “round” can be applied to the shape of the earth is part of those meaning conventions.
And there we get to Flint’s point. Using your version of knowledge, whether I know something is decided by social convention rather than by what I know.
keiths:
Neil:
Meanings evolve over time, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be fitted to reality. If I ask you to “hand me the keys”, you know the meaning of the word “keys” and can fit it to reality. You hand me the keys and not the salt shaker. If I ask you to point at the moon, you point at the moon and not at a fencepost.
That’s because the meaning of “round” is itself a social convention. Suppose that in the Fleebish language “round” means “pencil-thin”, but every other word means the same as it does in English. In Fleebish, “round” can’t be applied to the shape of the earth because the earth, in reality, is not pencil-thin. But the earth’s shape doesn’t change depending on the words you use to describe it. The earth’s shape, in reality, matches what we mean in English by “round”, but not what Fleebish speakers mean by that word.
I am an English speaker. The earth’s shape matches one of the English meanings of the word “round”. Therefore, when I say “the earth is round”, I am stating a truth. If a Fleebish speaker were to say “the earth is round”, they would not be stating a truth. The earth’s shape stays the same regardless. Social conventions can determine which word is used to express the truth about the earth’s shape, but that underlying truth doesn’t change. The earth really is what we, in English, would call “round”.
That isn’t what I mean by knowledge. What I know about the shape of the earth isn’t decided by social convention. How I use language to express it is. But even if I did believe that knowledge was decided by social convention, Flint’s claim wouldn’t follow.
How would you get from “knowledge is decided by social convention” to “nobody can actually know anything”? If knowledge were decided by social convention, then of course we could actually know things.
Under either conception of knowledge, Flint’s claim doesn’t follow from my reasoning.
Flint:
Not so. I am a counterexample, and so are many other atheists. I was a staunch Christian until about the age of 14, and in fact I seriously considered (at the urging of my pastor) whether I had a calling for the ministry. My faith unraveled subsequently.
Aristotle may have meant something very different. He was the tutor of Alexander the Great. As everybody who ever raised a child knows it does not end at age seven, but it can effectively begin at that age.
But your argument with Flint was about how it is expressed in language.
I’m finished with this. You are doing what you always do. You are twisting your language use so that you can continue to disagree. It all becomes pointless.
keiths:
Neil:
No, we were talking about whether it’s legitimate to assume for the sake of argument that the earth is flat. That’s a dispute over an assumption, not over the language in which the assumption is expressed. Here’s Flint:
Note that he doesn’t hesitate to characterize “the earth is flat” as the position of the flat earthers. He knows that flat earthers do not believe that the earth is perfectly smooth; they acknowledge the existence of mountains and valleys. They nevertheless use the word “flat”, and so does Flint.
His objection is not to the use of the word “flat”. He’s objecting to my assuming for the sake of argument that the earth is flat, because (apparently) I’m only allowed to do that if I share the firm conviction that the earth really is flat. Or as he put it elsewhere, only if I have “deeply internalized” it. Which is silly. What we are allowed to assume for the sake of argument depends in no way on what our audience believes or the tenacity with which they hold on to their beliefs.
As I put it earlier:
Neil:
Suit yourself.
I’m using the word “round” in a way that English speakers routinely do. It matches the dictionary definition. That does not constitute “twisting my language use”.
I made the attempt to distinguish between intellectual and emotional commitments. To me, one of the key distinctions is that intellectual convictions are inherently alterable in the face of facts, logic and evidence. Emotional commitments are not. I do not believe one can adopt for the sake of discussion someone else’s emotional commitment.
One current parlor game is to try to understand the commitment of tens of millions of trumpies to Trump. After all, it’s well documented that Trump is amoral, dishonest, ignorant, vicious and vindictive, and hasn’t the slightest clue how to govern (or even what that means) and no ability to consider the welfare of anyone but himself. But he’s not appealing to peoples’ intellects, his appeal is entirely emotional. He appeals to fear, to bigotry, to anger, to resentment. These are powerful appeals, but more important, these appeals CANNOT be altered with argument. I suspect if Trump were to die, most trumpies would vote for his corpse, because their emotional needs would not change.
Flint:
You don’t need to adopt anyone else’s emotional commitment in order to assume something for the sake of argument. Assuming for the sake of argument that the earth is flat doesn’t require you to believe it at all, much less with the fervor of a dedicated flat earther. All it requires is that you reason as if the earth were flat to see whether that leads to a contradiction, an absurdity, or a prediction that is at odds with observation. You can do that regardless of your emotions regarding the earth’s purported flatness. You can do that regardless of your audience. You can even do that if there’s no audience at all and it’s just an intellectual exercise on your part. As I put it earlier:
If my argument fails to convince a dedicated flat earther, does that mean there must be something wrong with it? Does it mean that there’s something illegitimate about assuming, for the sake of argument, that the earth is flat? No, because as you’ve pointed out, some people are emotionally committed to their beliefs and can’t be swayed by evidence and reason. If so, the fact that they can’t be swayed is on them. It doesn’t point to a problem with the argument or with the person presenting it.
If you are arguing against someone’s emotional commitment, you can’t adopt his emotional state for the sake of argument. You cannot even understand his emotional state.
Whether the earth is flat can be either an emotional or an intellectual belief. If it is intellectual, good facts and logic can be convincing because the belief itself is based on facts. But if it is based on emotion, words are worthless. True belief isn’t based on evidence or logic. You can identify a true belief because you cannot alter it no matter how correct your position is in fact.
Not quite. Yes, you can certainly do that regardless of your emotional claims, but so what?
Perhaps this essay might enlighten you:
https://scepsis.net/eng/articles/id_2.php
After you read that, you decide if Kurt Wise is stupid, or deaf. Was he unwilling to listen to science? How do YOU explain his behavior?
Yes, you can do that without any audience, because it is a game. As I said at the start. But if there is a real person you’re talking to, playing this game in your own mind is nugatory.
Nothing is wrong with your argument, but something is fatally wrong with your selection of an opponent.
But then, of course, why bother arguing? You’re playing a parlor game. You can’t seem to grasp that the true believer would laugh, assert the earth is flat, and simply ignore you as not worth talking to. Now, you may come away convinced that the true believer is stupid, or blind, or subhuman or whatever, but what you come away with is irrelevant. If your goal is to inform someone else’s opinion in order to change it, you have to be credible to them, not to yourself.
You’ve made it clear that you regard your arguments as ironclad and bulletproof. Several informed and intelligent people attempted disagreement, quite strongly, with your assertions, your premises, but to no avail. You were absolutely positive you were correct. And as the old saw teaches us, you can be absolutely positive or you can be probably correct, but you can’t be both. I think we finally decided that you had an emotional commitment, impervious to argument.
keiths:
Flint:
I’m not arguing against the flat-earther’s emotional commitment, nor have I tried to adopt the flat-earther’s emotional state, which in any case is going to vary from individual to individual. It’s irrelevant. My goal isn’t to feel and reason as the flat earther does. I simply want to develop an argument, based on evidence and reason, that demonstrates why the flat earther’s cardinal belief — that the earth is flat — is false. As one step in that process, I am assuming his belief for the sake of argument. Just his belief, not his emotional state.
The argument is directed against the assertion that the earth is flat. This can be done without any reference to a flat earther whatsoever. I could even develop the argument if no one at all actually believed that the earth was flat. The argument stands on its own.
It can be emotionally motivated or intellectually motivated, but the belief is the same in either case. It’s the belief that the earth is flat.
If a sound argument shows that a belief is wrong, then it’s wrong. The argument succeeds. It doesn’t matter whether the belief is emotionally or intellectually motivated. It doesn’t matter whether the audience is swayed. The content of the belief — in this case “the earth is flat” — is what the argument is concerned with, not the motivation of any particular person or persons holding that belief.
keiths:
Flint:
It’s because a sound argument is sound, regardless of the emotions of the person propounding it. Indeed, a sound argument is sound regardless of who is propounding it. It’s also sound regardless of who is hearing it. Soundness is a property of the argument itself.
Flint:
He makes his motivation pretty clear: the Bible trumps science. He is someone who can’t be swayed by evidence and reason when they conflict with the scriptures of his religion.
keiths:
Flint:
Doing it without an audience doesn’t necessarily make it a game. You might be trying to fix your car, for example. It’s showing certain symptoms, and you suspect the injectors. But you want to rule out the fuel pump, so you assume for the sake of argument that it’s the fuel pump, and you ask yourself what the symptoms would look like in that case. If the predicted symptoms don’t match the observed symptoms, then the problem isn’t with the fuel pump. (Assuming your reasoning is correct, of course.) There’s no audience, but it isn’t just a “parlor game”. It serves a practical purpose.
keiths:
Flint:
Who says we should only debate people who can be swayed? There are other reasons for debating, you know. You can do it recreationally. You can do it to sharpen your skills. You can do it to improve your understanding of the subject matter. You can do it for the benefit of bystanders who aren’t themselves participating in the discussion. You can do it out of curiosity about how die-hard believers rationalize their beliefs in the face of compelling counterarguments.
keiths:
Flint:
See the reasons I listed above.
If the goal were simply to change the mind of my opponent, I wouldn’t be arguing with Bill. Does anyone expect Bill to deconvert at this point? The goal instead is to formulate a sound argument that successfully demonstrates what it sets out to demonstrate. If it happens by some miracle to convince Bill, then that’s a bonus. It’s not a criterion of success, though.
They didn’t just attempt disagreement, they actually disagreed, and they presented counterarguments. I examined those counterarguments and responded to them, explaining why I disagreed. It’s called “debate”.